Real Plastic Snow

In a single story Scottsdale Spanish Colonial, on a sunny, seventy-five degree day in December 1987, a woman and her daughter are making it snow.

They are in the family room, not the living room--a distinction still not entirely clear to the girl, even after two years. As best she can tell, it has something to do with the furniture. The living room sofa is new and expensive, off white and off limits. Patterned across its smooth linen are watercolor swipes of pastel teal, peach, and mauve. Colors the girl will come to know as a familiar Southwestern palette, echoed in near daily sunsets of staggering polychromy. The family room couch, on the other hand, is old and worn, one of the few pieces moved down from Michigan. A solid cream chenille, scattered with pea-sized cigarette burns and clumps of accumulated pet hair, it is the locus of household leisure. One look and it's obvious which is the real living room.

Regardless, they are the only family in the family room today. They'll be the only family in the family room come Christmas, too. In fact, they have been the only family in the entire house all year. The girl's older brother has been in Durango Juvenile Detention Facility since January, and her father moved out not long after. It's just her, her mother, and their growing collection of dogs (two) and cats (three).

The cats love the snow. They sit watching, tails flicking with anticipatory mischief, as the girl and her mother sprinkle it by the handful over the ceramic holiday-themed village assembled across three end tables covered by a sheet. The snow must be purchased new each year. It's too difficult to repackage. By January, the cats will have batted most of it to the floor, spreading it to every corner of the house where it will mix with their fur and the detritus of seldom vacuumed carpet. Easier to just buy more of the stuff. Fine by the girl, since that means a trip to the craft store, where she can gaze at rainbow row after rainbow row of art supplies. Soft bricks of modeling clay, begging to be molded into a zoo full of animals. Furry pipe cleaners, silky-soft and full of silly promise. She knows if she asks, her mother will buy her anything she wants. It's how her mother shows love, though it will be decades before the girl will make that connection. Before she sees that it was easier--simpler and cleaner--for her mother to open her purse than her heart.

But right now, they must ration the Department 56 Non-flammable Real Plastic Snow in order to adequately cover the village grounds. This year the girl, who arranged the pieces while her mother looked on with a glass of wine, has spread things out. The village center is a cozy cluster of commerce as usual--bakery, diner, gas station, post office, city hall--but the homes have been spaced out in an exurb at the outskirts of the tables. Plenty of room between each piece. Room enough for a yard, to be precise. That houses should have wide, grassy yards is a religious certainty the girl didn't know she held until she moved to the desert. But now she understands how lucky she'd been all her life, just to have a thing as basic as a yard. Baseball games with her brother and his friends. Getting dragged around in a sled by her dad. Raking piles of leaves into mounds just for the joy of stomping them. Laying on her stomach in the summer, combing through patches of clover in search of good luck.

None of that is possible at her new home, where there is only jagged landscaping rock and prickly cactus outside her front door, no matter the season. And so she has invested into the little ceramic village this year all her memories of Michigan winters past. Her mother helps her set the weather, but once the snow has been dropped it will be up to her to outfit the town with accessories. Stop signs and street lights with tiny, blinking bulbs. Mailboxes and cars, comically out of proportion to one another. A paperboy on his bicycle, riding down imaginary streets she has lined with real bottle brush trees. It is a magical scene she can escape into for one month a year, while outside there is nothing to indicate winter except a slightly sharper chill at night.

It will have to do for now.

---

On a downtown Chicago sidewalk in January 2022, a woman in a wool coat adjusts her earmuffs and peers up at the blue hour skyline. She has come to recognize the exact shade of luminous, ominous grey the sky turns when snow is coming. Sure enough, the first dry flurries begin to dust her face. She feels it breaking across her again--the sense of wonder and enchantment that hasn't loosened its grip since she got to the city. Snow. I'm in snow.

She has to squint for much of the walk home; the wind is against her and the swirling white flakes fly straight in her eyes. But she has the sights memorized, anyway. The street lamps, already amber in the five o'clock hour. The brass plaques fitted to the stone walls of buildings. The cheerful blue mailboxes and elegant sidewalk benches. The awning-covered stairwells leading up to the train stops. All of it blanketed with snow. Real snow. Crystallized water dropped in gentle clouds or spitting swarms. Snow that builds quiet into the city, dampening sound in a way she didn't expect, because she forgot. She knew once, that she's sure of. But now is a time of remembering some things and forgetting others, and she likes to think that deep inside her is a reawakening of knowledge, of familiarity with deep, real winter.

It is like Narnia to her. Just as magical, just as secret. Because who could understand? Who could ever understand the history of this moment? The snow is a signifier of things she barely realizes herself. It is purifying and redemptive in ways she's almost afraid to consider. Winter has stolen her heart; at some point she will have to break the news to autumn.

But for now, it's time to get home. She walks through the city center--the coffee shops, banks, and restaurants--to her cozy high rise apartment on the edge of the downtown loop. Not for the first time, not for the last, she cries with happiness. She can't help it. It's just too beautiful. It means so much. Gelid droplets run frozen streaks down her face, and she can't tell which are tears and which are melting snowflakes.